Read this article in English | සිංහල | தமிழ்

WELCOME TO THE MATRIX, NEO

This year we set out to create a representation of the city of Colombo in virtual space. You can see a lot more detail about how we did this by going here. Ultimately, what we ended up with was a nearly 1:1 replica with regards to topography, road networks, and the patterns of land use in the country.

We built this in a game famous for people’s attempts to replicate reality: that is, Cities Skylines. As much as possible, we used real data from the Colombo Municipal Council, from the Urban Development Authority, from the Department of Census and Statistics, and from other sources, including consulting with experts at the University of Moratuwa’s Transport and Planning Department.

We’re perhaps about 100 meters shorter overall than the actual city of Colombo. You can see more details (and get your own copy of Colombo) here. But in this is every major road and every representation of whether a space is a residential building or commercial building on an 8 by 8 meter grid. We even have slightly over a million virtual citizens divided broadly into clusters that live in the city and clusters that use the seven main road arteries feeding into the city to travel in for work and education, just like in real life.

You can ask questions like, why would we do something like this? Are we mad? And the answer is obviously yes. But sanity is a relative measure anyway.

The underlying reason is that we have been on a quest to communicate how complex systems work in this country. We’ve mapped not only the economic fortunes of the country, but the downfall and upticks in practically every other sector. But few things have been as complex or as difficult to explain as the intricacies of urban design and transport.

Over the decades, politicians, urban planners, experts, foreign aid organizations have debuted many plans to improve and modify the shape of our cities, particularly that of Colombo. Plans such as the Western Region Mecapolis, as well as COMTRANs and various plans to better the human condition have been in progress for a very long time and consume lots of public resources. Sometimes vast amounts of debt are involved. Sometimes these changes are useful and relevant to the public and people who actually live there. Sometimes these plans are the dreams of autocrats who want tidier cities bending the knee to them. And the public only gets to see the effects with our own eyes once things are well underway.

While we rightly play the role of skeptics for many of these things, it goes without saying that for our readers to make choices about the world that they live in, they deserve better information.

Hence our city of Colombo. By using something relatively accessible we’ve created a system, a canvas on which ideas can be prototyped. And hopefully misinformation can be stepped around. To illustrate, let’s look at one of the most promising plans of recent times, the COMTRANs project.

THE PROBLEMS WITH THIS CITY

If you’re a member of the general public, word of the COMTRANs project may have filtered to you in bits and pieces. You may have heard of Japanese aid to build a monorail, causing much shock in the international community when we denied it. You may have heard plans of expanding roads, moving pieces of the city around and adding new corridors for traffic. You may have heard much debate late night political TV talk shows with ill-informed opponents slinging slurs at each other.

Now, we’ve already written about transport in the country, how it’s structured, and as well as the history of policy changes and innovations and vast sweeping modifications to the infrastructure of this country. You can go read that piece here.

The COMTRANs project is one of the most ambitious proposed in recent times. Assembled by the Japan International Corporation Agency, using a lot of brain power from the University of Moratawa and private consultants, it presented two things:

1. A comprehensive list of problems with the Colombo Municipal Area, with projections up to 2035
2. A list of solutions to the tune of 2.78 trillion rupees in 2014 times (almost 21 billion dollars, which is almost 7 trillion rupees today, accounting for an a 151.26% increase in prices and a 60.2% decrease). For context, that’s nearly half of our country’s GDP, as of the latest numbers available from the Department of Census and Statistics.

To start with, a few definitions:

1. The area that we call “Colombo” is the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) area.
2. The Colombo Municipal Area, aka “Greater Colombo”, includes the Colombo Municipal Council and a few pieces around it.

Right. Now, onto the problems:

1. The population of Greater Colombo is increasing. They estimate that this green area in particular will have 5 million people by 2035.

   This isn’t just about people having children, but also it comes down to people moving towards centers of economic activity. The Western province accounts for roughly 45% of the GDP and this city of Colombo is a substantial chunk of that.

2. With an increase in population naturally comes an increase in transport demand. Now the way Colombo is structured, all the good stuff happens in that CMC area. Jobs, education, you know, hence the old term, kolambata kiri, gamata kakiri. Ultimately, these people need to get in and out of CMC for their livelihoods. Whether we like it or not. This is where stuff happens.

3. Traffic and congestion in Colombo is already pretty bad. It’s pretty severe during the morning and evening peak times. It is pretty bad within those CMC boundaries and it will naturally continue to get worse over time.

   Within these boundaries, vehicle speeds are declining. Which means people stay in traffic for longer, their vehicles burn more fuel, environmental costs go up. So much becomes so inefficient, from everyday commutes to the transport of goods.

4. Public transport is garbage. Our public transport has insufficient capacity. There are too few buses and trains for too many people. Overcrowding is rife, quality of service is poor, and worst of all the increasing traffic on the roads means that none of these systems can get from point A to point B in a predictable fashion.

5. Because of this lack of quality public transport, people are shifting increasingly towards private transport. This is something that we also explored in our previous article on transport in Sri Lanka. In general, incomes in the area are rising and with that rise in income, some form of private transport is rapidly becoming the norm for families that can afford it.

   There is another factor affecting this, which is that of urbanization. For example, Batramulla and Rajagiriya are no longer suburbs but are actually complex pieces of the city in and of themselves. As the city expands in this way, with apartments and offices and commercial areas and so on, the affordable suburbs keep expanding and pushing outwards. This means that the length of the trip that one has to make increases on average as more people have to come into the CMC area from further away. This not only affects fuel prices and expenditure, but also drives up the need for more private transport.

   This in turn increases household expenditure, increases congestion on the roads and makes everything slower, more expensive, and less efficient.

6. Compounding all this is the problem of our road network. It’s insufficient, especially in suburban areas. It’s far too small for the volume of traffic that expects to flow through it, and it also lacks pedestrian facilities; so even people who may not want to get on a vehicle and may only have to do a short distance trip don’t necessarily want to walk.

In a nutshell, they pointed out in 2014 that Colombo was well on its way to becoming worse and worse and worse. It is now 2024 and those predictions have certainly come true.

We can add more to this, of course. Colombo is often a bizarre mix of organic growth- it’s literally a harbour town that grew outwards - and planning that sometimes has to work around vested interests (such as existing buildings whose owners you can’t budge) and planning that’s just sometimes outright stupid.

Here’s an illustration. This is a bird’s eye view of Viharamadevi Park and the bizarre mass of road connections in front of it. 

Now, roundabouts are an effective and safe way of feeding people in from multiple directions and letting them make turns at different points. Clearly, we can build roundabouts, and you can see this from the two that I’ve drawn arrows at. And if we replaced that front section with a roundabout it would not only make it easier to navigate, but far safer, since traffic essentially only moves in one direction. 

Looking at the city from this more macro perspective also shows us areas of infrastructure that are being swamped. For example, here are the roads leading in and out of Cemetary junction. We can see that the Borella main road - Elvitigala Mawatha stretch is under much higher load relative to the rest of the infrastructure around it. So maybe this is a prime position for flyovers?

Or consider, at a micro level, this road: 

This is the actual shape of the junction between Baladaksha Mawatha, Justice Akbar Mawatha, Sri Uttarananda Mawtha and Sri Mohommad Macan Marikar Mawatha. And in our building of Colombo it has become the junction I hate the most. Because functionally, this is four roads plugging into a single center: you could replace this mess with a roundabout or even a simple four-way junction. Instead, what we have is this bizarre mess of confusing road directions that creates multiple points for traffic accidents. It’s less of a junction and more of a bizarre hodgepodge of risks.

COMTRANS IN A NUTSHELL

So, what are the solutions to this problem?

The are many proposals and solutions - the Western Region Megapolis plan was huge back in the day, and there are smaller initiatives like sticking flyovers everywhere. For the sake of illustration, we’re going to stick with COMTRANS.

The key to the whole Comtrans plan is increasing the use of public transport.  The idea is that if you can get more people on public transport, you can potentially reduce traffic, improve safety, make the whole thing a whole lot cheaper and reduce a lot of the pollution and health issues that come about as a result of having lots of traffic on roads. \nTo do this, COMTRANS proposed the following:

1. Rail network overhauls and transport hubs
   • Introduction of a monorail network
   • Implementation of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems on major corridors: high-capacity buses operating on dedicated bus lanes along Galle Road, Base Line Road, Kandy Road, and the Middle Ring Road (explained later) between Rathmalana, Battamuralla and Wattala. 
   • Modernization and expansion of existing railway lines (Main Line, Coast Line, and Puttalam Line)
   • A Multi-modal Transport Hub in Pettah that connects the BRT, monorail and existing railway systems, connecting to the Colombo-Katunayake Expressway, which allows everything from intercity buses to trains to connect at one big central point.
2. Adding new roads and widening existing corridors:

   • Arterial roads for the BRT system, with dedicated bus lanes in both directions

   • East-West Direction Roads: new major roads parallel to Malabe Corridor, High Level Road, and Low Level Road, to allow more more back and forth capacity 

   • North-South Direction Roads: extending Marine Drive from Dehiwala to Rathmalana

   • Three “Ring Roads”

     1. Base Line Road extension to Rathmalana
     2. Middle Ring Road connecting Rathmalana, Battaramulla, and Wattala
     3. Western ring-roads connected with Dehiwala, Nugegoda, and Battaramulla (two-lane road)

   • Suburban road arteries: two-lane roads at intervals of 1 or 2km in areas between corridors

   • A new Main Urban Expressway, connecting the south side of Kelani Bridge via the CMC boundary to the Southern Expressway, to provide capacity for long-distance interprovincial travel and trips from suburbs to city center

   • The Port Access Elevated Road, connecting the Colombo Katunayake Expressway (CKE) via new Kelani Bridge to Colombo port, to prevent container trailers and port-related vehicles from running on ground-level roads

And all of this is backed up by a host of new elevated roads at bottleneck intersections. Think Dehiwala or Borella junction.

They also proposed a host of traffic management and environmental and safety measures. This includes better traffic demand management systems and a road pricing system for congested areas that could disincentivize people from cramming into congested roads or at least make it a little bit more expensive.

• Implement area control systems for traffic signals at major intersections
• New bus priority policies for areas that the BRT won’t touch, like the Horana corridor
• Encourage flexible work hours
• Promote carpooling
• Incentivize off-peak travel and deploy an Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system in congested areas by 2025, so that using heavy traffic areas come at a cost
• Enhance air pollutant and noise emission standards
• Promote eco-friendly vehicles (hybrid, electric, natural gas)
• Implement a low-sulphur diesel program
• Enhance vehicle inspection and maintenance programs
• Rehabilitate railway signal systems
• Analyze traffic accident causes to inform future safety measures
• Establish urban road design standards, including sidewalk provisions

The idea, at least in 2014, was that the initial phase of this work would start in 2020, reach an intermediate phase by 2025 and then a final phase by 2035. In hindsight, these timelines are not going to happen. As with any Sri Lankan planning, they’re far too optimistic and things change over time. If you’re hearing about these in the news, from politicians, in discussions, it might be because we are smack in the middle of that timeline at the moment.

Now, of course, we can debate about whether such grand plans are ever achievable in the first place. Reading through the 400-plus page document that outlines all this, we could not help but feel that perhaps a sequence of smaller and less ambitious plans would perhaps have had more success. But this is the nature of development plans proposed in Sri Lanka; they tend to be very ambitious. And as a result, quite difficult even for policymakers to visualize in their entirety.

So, what would Colombo look like if we did these things? 

USING VIRTUAL COLOMBO TO VISUALIZE GRAND PLANS

For purposes of brevity, we are not going to implement the Comtrans plans in full. That would potentially take us a lot more time. However, we read through each stage of the plan and broke it down into five broad phases, starting by establishing transport hubs in Peta and then ending with the monorail being connected. Out of these, we selected the first two. Here’s how the workflow in our virtual world would progress:

Phase 1: Establish a Multi-modal Transport Hub in Pettah

1. Create central station (train + bus) in Pettah/Fort area
2. Connect hub to Colombo-Katunayake Expressway (CKE)
3. Prepare connection points for future BRT, monorail, and railway lines

Other than this diagram, COMTRANS doesn’t say anything about the actual architecture of this multimodal transport hub. However, it seems pretty clear that the functionality is to bring our existing infrastructure into one single central point where passengers can access the railway, the monorail and bus services. It’s expected that the railway is sort of the center of the story in the sheer number of people that it’s going to carry back and forth.

We can model this in Skylines by selecting a train station, a monorail station and a bus station separately and putting them down with connected roads. There are, of course, combinations of these stations, but for functionality purposes we are going to stay away from those for now. Given the description, it seems that modifying the Fort Railway Station and its environs is a good place for this.

And here right away we run into our first practical consideration: space. This area is already quite heavily built up. Even all that green space that might show up as a buildable area is actually not buildable at all; the actual Colombo Fort railway station is many times larger than the 3D model that we’ve used here to represent it. Everything is already occupied.

This is a very minimal arrangement: the railway section of the station is quite small, in start contrast to the multi-line setup of today; and we’ve set up this rolling loop structure to keep things moving. Even so, significant chunks of Pettah need to be bought up and destroyed in order to lay down this kind of infrastructure. The spec calls for a connection to the Colombo-Katunayake Expressway, which we’ve preserved here via Olcott Mawatha; but these roads need to be dramatically widened.

Phase 2: Upgrade Existing Infrastructure

1. Railway Modernization:

   1. Upgrade to high-speed rail: Main Line, Coast Line, Puttalam Line

2. Road Upgrades (to 6-lane with bus lanes):

   1. Galle Road, Base Line Road, Kandy Road
   2. Road specs: 29.0m wide, 2 bus lanes (3.4m each), 4 general lanes (3.2m each), sidewalks, separators

3. Upgrade Marine Drive to 6-lane road with sidewalks and bike lanes

Upgrading the existing roads to the full 6-lane spec (2 bus lanes, 4 normal lanes, pavements, separators) means more space on those sides. Look at how much more space the new road (left, right) need compared to the old road structure (center). 

As a consequence, every one of these buildings fronting the road have to be either destroyed or modified. The blank blue squares lining the road are places that buildings used to be before we upgraded them.

It turns out the answer to “why don’t we just have bus lanes and wider pavements?” is probably because some of the city’s most valuable real estate is hogging the road. 

As expensive as it is, it also makes sense. That wide road now stitches seaside Colombo together with buses that run smooth and wide, walkable pavements. Further inland, the Baseline Road upgrade does the same, although there the effects on the surrounding shopfronts are less extreme. 

Add the BRT (those elongated buses moving along bus lanes), and you have a Galle Road that’s significantly friendlier and cheaper to move across.

And then, of course, there’s Marine Drive:

Ultimately, these specific changes improve mobility up and down these broad red lines - at a huge cost to the businesses that already inhabit the same lines.  

BETTER CRITIQUE WITH BETTER VISUALIZATIONS

Testing an idea this way also shows us four things, in very broad terms:

Firstly, it lets us better visualize the utility of a set of ideas. We think this is important: visual aids work so much better than lines of text describing sets of numbers. Setting something up and watching the simulation run shows us interesting things about how large changes impact neighborhoods and how people flow through them. They may not be real people or real vehicles, but half a loaf of bread is better than nothing at all. 

Second, it gives us a glimmer of the realpolitik that happens with plans like these. Doing this roadbuilding, it’s very clear to us that very little of these changes happen on property that the government owns and can give away. The new lanes cut significantly into a staggering amount of privately owned, high-value commercial property, from kottu kade’s to malls to cafes to petrol stations to office fronts. Every one of those owners must be negotiated with, paid off, and so on. So while these kinds of plans are simple to ideate, in practice, the stroke of a designer’s pen becomes arguments that take years, if not decades. 

Third, it lets us better critique ideas. For example, take the COMTRANS alteration to Marine Drive. Marine Drive today is full of businesses - some shady, most not - and is in the process of turning into a vibrant food street. Up and down are dozens of restaurants, cafes, a major mosque, apartments, hotels. Most of these are SMEs. 

Now, anyone with common sense will point out that the people who frequent these places use the road as parking. This is a combination of Sri Lankan police not actively penalizing parking on the sides of the road as well as practicality: Colombo does not have a lot of parking space for all its vehicles. If you put bike lanes on the sides, two things will happen:

1. Either people will happily park in the bike lanes, rendering them moot OR
2. If the police enforce parking rules, people will eventually stop parking on the sides, making that stretch of Marine Drive a lot less viable for those businesses struggling to make ends meet in today’s economy

Unless, of course, we build parking: or make it expensive to run cars along that road. Bike lane implementations without adequate measures mean nothing in the long run. Also, perhaps people who champion bike lanes on such scales should first ride up and down Marine Drive at noon, and see whether it’s at all practical to cycle to and fro in Colombo temperatures; there is, after all, a reason that daily cycling is largely the province of the rich and idle, the very healthy (see previous), and the very poor. Perhaps that money might be better spent on more bus lanes, more lanes in general, or shaded pavements. 

Fourth is scale. When visualized, it’s immediately apparent both how grand these changes are - and how little this is in the grand scheme of things. There’s so much more we could and should upgrade, if we really cared about walkability and easy transport across the whole city; and clearly it will cost so much more and take decades to make any headway. Anyone promising monorails and bus lanes in a single election cycle is someone we can and should hold with suspicion, now that we have a better visual understanding of the problems. 

NEXT STEPS

For reasons of brevity (not sanity), we didn’t implement most of COMTRANS. There’s some ambitious stuff in there, including:

1. Port Access Elevated Road: CKE to Colombo Port via New Kelani Bridge

2. Main Urban Expressway: Kelani Bridge to Southern Expressway connection

3. Ring Roads:

   1. Base Line Road Extension: Kirulapone to Rathmalana
   2. Middle Ring Road: Rathmalana - Battaramulla - Wattala
   3. Western Ring Road: Dehiwala - Nugegoda - Battaramulla

4. East-West Direction Roads: Parallel to Malabe Corridor, High Level Road, Low Level Road

5. Marine Drive Extension: Dehiwala to Rathmalana

But this isn’t about COMTRANS. We picked COMTRANs because it’s a great catalogue of problems that we’ll face over the next decade; it’s a textbook example of the kind of complex information people have to absorb to examine these plans; and it genuinely does contain almost all urban design changes thrown around in recent memory. 

But be it COMTRANS, a new plan, a new proposal or even a casual idea (like ours: what if we banned everything except buses, three-wheelers and trains in the CMC area?) you can take it for a spin and visualize it for yourself. If enough of us go the extra mile - and hopefully we’ve made it a lot more fun to do so - this becomes a great avenue for more informed public discourse. And hopefully, in a very small way, a contribution towards a society where we can not only hold our governments accountable, but understand, evaluate, and endorse plans that make a better society for us all.

If you’ve made it this far, we’ve got a springboard for you to get started. Here are our notes for the phases we didn’t implement from COMTRANS:

Phase 3: Construct New Major Roads

1. Port Access Elevated Road: CKE to Colombo Port via New Kelani Bridge
2. Main Urban Expressway: Kelani Bridge to Southern Expressway connection
3. Ring Roads: a) Base Line Road Extension: Kirulapone to Rathmalana b) Middle Ring Road: Rathmalana - Battaramulla - Wattala c) Western Ring Road: Dehiwala - Nugegoda - Battaramulla
4. East-West Direction Roads: Parallel to Malabe Corridor, High Level Road, Low Level Road
5. Marine Drive Extension: Dehiwala to Rathmalana

Phase 4: Implement BRT System

1. Create BRT lines on prepared roads:

   1. Galle Road, Base Line Road, Kandy Road, Middle Ring Road

2. Set up BRT stations at regular intervals and key locations

Phase 5: Develop Monorail Network

1. Key stations: Pettah, Kollupitiya, Bambalapitiya, Wellawatta, Dehiwala, Mount Lavinia

Here’s a challenge: see if you can implement it for yourself. As reference, here’s the COMTRANs document. It’s going to take a little bit of work, of course, but at the end of it you’ll be left with a Colombo-that-might-have-been, if enough people understood and agreed on it.  

Speaking of which, we’re going back to our train station to try and finish the monorails. Thanks for reading, and enjoy. 

Acknowledgements

This work was created by Watchdog Sri Lanka (Appendix) as a part of the project Building Tools to Strengthen Pluralist, Inclusive and Fact-based Public Discourse, conducted by LIRNEasia. LIRNEasia (www.lirneasia.net) is a pro-poor, pro-market regional digital policy think tank. The project is conducted in partnership with the Strengthening Social Cohesion and Peace in Sri Lanka (SCOPE) programme, co-funded by the European Union and German Federal Foreign Office. SCOPE is implemented by GIZ in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, Prisons Affairs and Constitutional Reforms.

Special thanks to Professor Amal Kumarage and Dr. Amila Buddhika Jayasinghe for data, research, and contributions, especially around the commuter flow across the main arteries that connect the CMC with the rest of the country. This project would not exist without the knowledge and hard work from immensely talented modding community around Cities: Skylines: Andreas Pardeike, boformer, kian.zarrin, FireController#1847, LinuxFan, Krzychu1245, leftbehind, Bloodypenguin, algernon, Chamëleon TBN, Simon Ryr and others listed in full in the mods section.